George Steiner: Trending quotes

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George Steiner: 148   quotes 5   likes

“We speak still of "sunrise" and "sunset." We do so as if the Copernican model of the solar system had not replaced, ineradicably, the Ptolemaic. Vacant metaphors, eroded figures of speech, inhabit our vocabulary and grammar. They are caught, tenaciously, in the scaffolding and recesses of our common parlance. There they rattle about like old rags or ghosts in the attic.”

George Steiner

Source: Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City, Ch. 1 (p. 3).

“Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.”

George Steiner

"The Retreat from the Word," Kenyon Review (Spring 1961).
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)

Reality , Silence , Parting

“Literature and the arts are also criticism in a more particular and practical sense. They embody an expository reflection on, a value judgement of, the inheritance and context to which they pertain.”

George Steiner

Source: Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City, Ch. 4 (p. 11).

Art , Literature , Sense

“Nothing in the next-door world of Dachau impinged on the great winter cycle of Beethoven chamber music played in Munich. No canvases came off museum walls as the butchers strolled reverently past, guide-books in hand.”

George Steiner

"In a Post-Culture".
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

Books , World , Music , Winter

“We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can
play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the
morning.”

George Steiner

Preface.
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)
Context: We come after. We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning. To say that he has read them without understanding or that his ear is gross, is cant. In what way does this knowledge bear on literature and society, on the hope, grown almost axiomatic from the time of Plato to that of Matthew Arnold, that culture is a humanizing force, that the energies of spirit are transferable to those of conduct?

Reading

“In aesthetic discourse, no interpretative-critical analysis, doctrine or programme is superseded, is erased, by any later construction. The Copernican theory did correct and supersede that of Ptolemy. The chemistry of Lavoisier makes untenable the early phlogiston theory. Aristotle on mimesis and pathos is not superseded by Lessing or Bergson. The Surrealist manifestos of Breton do not cancel out Pope's Essay on Criticism though they may well be antithetical to it.”

George Steiner

Source: Real Presences (1989), II: The Broken Contract, Ch. 3 (p. 76).

“The private ownership of great art, its seclusion from the general view of men and women, let alone from that of interested amateurs and scholars, is a curious business. The literal disappearance of a Turner or a Van Gogh into some Middle Eastern or Latin-American bank vault to be kept as investment and collateral, the sardonic decision of a Greek shipping tycoon to put an incomparable El Greco on his yacht, where it hangs at persistent risk — these are phenomena that verge on vandalism.”

George Steiner

"The Cleric of Treason".
George Steiner: A Reader (1984)

Women , Men , Art , Business

“The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform.”

George Steiner

Source: Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City, Ch. 6 (p. 27).

“Do the identifications with fictions, the inner, tidal motions of pathos and libido which the novel, the film, the painting, the symphony unleash within us somehow immunize us against the humbler, less formed, but actual claims of suffering and of need in our surroundings? Does the cry in the tragic play muffle, even blot out, the cry in the street?”

George Steiner

Source: Real Presences (1989), III: Presences, Ch. 1 (p. 144).

Suffering , Painting , Cry

“When it turned on the Jew, Christianity and European civilization turned on the incarnation — albeit an incarnation often wayward and unaware — of its own best hopes.”

George Steiner

"A Season in Hell".
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

Hope

“Creation of absolutely the first rank — in philosophy, in music, in much of literature, in mathematics — continues to occur outside the American milieu. It is at once taken up and intelligently exploited, but the "motion of the spirit" has taken place elsewhere, amid the enervation of Europe, in the oppressive climate of Russia. There is, in a good deal of American intellectual, artistic production (recent paining may be a challenging exception) a characteristic near-greatness, a strength just below the best. Could it be that the United States is destined to be the "museum culture?"”

George Steiner

"Tomorrow".
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

Pain , Music , Intelligence , Literature

“Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.”

George Steiner

Source: The Death of Tragedy (1961), Ch. III (p. 104).

“Literary criticism has about it neither rigour nor proof. Where it is honest, it is passionate, private experience seeking to persuade.”

George Steiner

Source: The Death of Tragedy (1961), Ch. X (p. 351).

Passion

“In the Soviet Union, he knew, great art hangs in public galleries. No scholars, no men and women waiting to mend their souls before a Raphael or a Matisse need wait, cap in hand at the mansion door.”

George Steiner

"The Cleric of Treason".
George Steiner: A Reader (1984)

Women , Men , Art , Soul

“It was a brilliant, mutinous period. Brecht gave back to German prose its Lutheran simplicity and Thomas Mann brought into his style the supple, luminous elegance of the classic and Mediterranean tradition. These years, 1920-33, were the anni mirabiles of the modern German spirit.”

George Steiner

"The Hollow Miracle" (1959).
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)

“Almost alone among cognitive-aesthetic movements and strategies of interpretation, deconstruction neither champions any body of past literature or art, nor does it act as vanguard or advocate for any contemporary or incipient school. The New Criticism and T. S. Eliot strove for the revaluation of Metaphysical poetry so as to underwrite, in turn, certain tactics of modenity. Aristotle was advocate for Sophocles. Deconstruction is, intentionally, marginal (a key trope) to all histories of taste and manifestos for innovation.”

George Steiner

Source: Real Presences (1989), II: The Broken Contract, Ch. 7 (p. 117).

School , Art , History , Literature

“What I affirm is the intuition that where God's presence is no longer a tenable supposition and where His absence is no longer a felt, indeed overwhelming weight, certain dimensions of thought and creativity are no longer attainable. And I would vary Yeats's axiom so as to say: no man can read fully, can answer answeringly to the aesthetic, whose "nerve and blood" are at peace in sceptical rationality, are now at home in immanence and verification. We must read as if.”

George Steiner

Source: Real Presences (1989), III: Presences, Ch. 7 (p. 229).

God , Peace , Home , Reading

“The Socratic demonstration of the ultimate unity of tragic and comic drama is forever lost. But the proof is in the art of Chekhov.”

George Steiner

Source: The Death of Tragedy (1961), Ch. VIII (p. 302).

Art